


Makoto - The Story of Toshizo Hijikata

by Ferasha



Category: Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto | Intrigue in the Bakumatsu, Drifters (Anime & Manga), Gintama, Hakuouki, Peacemaker Kurogane, 刀剣乱舞 | Touken Ranbu
Genre: Bakumatsu, Boshin War, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Essays, Gen, History, Shinsengumi - Freeform, non-fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-18 11:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10615860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferasha/pseuds/Ferasha
Summary: Gods help me, this is NOT a piece of fan fiction. This is a historical essay/novella about the actual life of Toshizo Hijikata, the rise and the fall of the Shinsengumi, the Boshin War, and the end of Edo Japan. I tried to tell the tale as accurately and interestingly as I could, so if you're curious to know what REALLY happened with the Shinsengumi and you're in the mood for some good ol' historical blabber, welcome aboard!





	1. The Prettyboy Who Wanted More

**Author's Note:**

> The madness began when I wanted to write "only a few lines" about a cosplay project of mine - Toshizo Hijikata, the "Hakuouki: Bakumatsu Musorouku" version. Being a compulsive storyteller, the "few lines" mutated into the monster that you see here - seven chapters, an epilogue and an afterword about Toshizo Hijikata, his life and death and everything in between. The story's finished, and I'll get to posting it here as quickly as I can.
> 
> For those who don't know, 'makoto' means 'truth' or 'honesty' in Japanese, and it is the sixth principle of the bushido code. The Shinsengumi chose it as their symbol and displayed it on their flags.
> 
> An important note: I'm not a native speaker, and this here is unbeta'd. I profoundly apologize for my possible linguistic awkwardness.
> 
> And to illustrate the writing, I'll be posting the pics of my cosplay here - photographed by Guru, edited by Shunak. The post-processing was done so that each pic reflects that particular chapter of the story - yup, I'm that much of a Shinsengumi fan. 
> 
> If you're curious about my cosplay stuff, you can always look me up on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ferashacosplay/
> 
> So there we go.

CHAPTER ONE – THE PRETTYBOY WHO WANTED MORE

 

“I want to lead an important life. I want to do it because I was born a human being.”

― Eiji Yoshikawa, "Musashi"

 

When Toshizo was born in the spring of 1835, his father had already been dead for several months, having succumbed to tuberculosis, a fashionable disease back in the 19th century. Toshizo was a late child: his mother, Etsu, was 43 years old when she gave birth to him. The Hijikatas were a farming family living in Hino – a village at the time, now a suburb of Tokyo. They were well-off, yet constrained by the social rules of Edo Japan, according to which farmers, merchants and other non-samurai ilk were treated as second class citizens.

Tuberculosis struck the Hijikata family again - Etsu passed away in 1841. Traumatized after the death of his mother and brought up by a large group of much elder siblings who weren’t entirely sure what to do with him, young Toshizo grew up to be – to quote his biographers – an entitled, spoiled brat prone to frequent temper tantrums, with unruly nature and a head full of dreams.

Young Toshizo was a pretty, pretty thing. In fact, it’s almost comical how far the contemporary historians went in describing his lush, exotic beauty: it was written in chronicles that he was “as handsome as an actor”, with “ivory skin” and “hair so black that it was almost blue”. Heads turned when he walked the streets, and women were known to faint upon seeing him, overwhelmed by his splendor. When his second-eldest brother Kiroku sent him off to become an apprentice in a kimono shop, the shop owner hoped that the boy’s good looks would help him attract more female customers. Yet Toshizo brought nothing but trouble – turned out he was way more interested in scissors as a weapon than as tools of the trade, and after one incident too many, the boy was returned home in shame. Hence Kiroku gave up on him and sent him to live with a man named Hikogoro Sato – husband of their sister Nobu – who was an apothecary and needed a helping hand in selling his concoctions.

So there he was, our Toshizo, in his early twenties, as pretty as a picture, sort of a failure in life, trudging the countryside to peddle bruise ointments, burn balms, pills for sore bones and all sorts of miraculous cures for baldness and erectile dysfunction. Strangely enough, he liked his job of a medicine seller. It allowed him to go places that a young man from Hino would never otherwise reach – larger towns, samurai estates, swordsmanship dojos. It allowed him to dream.

And young Toshizo had one single dream, so strong that it ate away at him like an obsession. Namely, Toshizo Hijikata wanted to become a samurai.

Now, normally that could never happen. Farmer boys did not become samurai just like that – not in Edo Japan. It was a fantasy, a castle in the air, a delusion that made his family shake their heads with sad disappointment – the boy’s so pretty, too bad he’s a bit on the cray-cray side.

But when in late 1850s Toshizo met Isami Kondo and a group of like-minded underdogs, this dream suddenly became a goal that maybe, just maybe, was not so crazy after all.

 

 

~to be continued~

 


	2. Being Noticed by Senpai

THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA CHAPTER TWO – BEING NOTICED BY SENPAI

 

“Be a Samurai.

Because you just never know what's behind the freaking sky.”

― Laini Taylor, "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

  
  
Somewhere in late 1850s’ – the exact year is, alas, lost to history – the region of Hino was affected by a wave of armed robberies. A group of thugs attacked and ransacked the homes of wealthier merchants. Afraid that his house might be targeted, Hikogoro Sato – Toshizo’s apothecary brother-in-law – decided to take action. Of course, he couldn’t afford samurai bodyguards – and besides, no self-respecting warrior would ever agree to work for a country bumpkin pill-pusher. So Sato found the next best thing: in return for protection, he opened his estate to one certain Isami Kondo and his sword fighting school, the Shieikan.   
  
Isami Kondo was no samurai either – he was, in fact, a farmer himself. As a child, he was an avid reader – his favorite book was the Chinese saga “Romance of Three Kingdoms”, with tales full of noble warriors, higher causes and deaths larger than life. When he was in early teens, a thief broke into his family home. He chased after the man armed with nothing but a stick and beat the crap out of the poor sod, successfully bringing back everything he stole. This adventure made Isami so famous in his village that an actual swordsmanship teacher came to seek him out, offering him a place in his school. For Isami, it turned out to be one hell of a deal – he ended up being adopted into the teacher’s family, and named the official heir of the dojo.   
  
And that’s how Isami Kondo ended up running the Shieikan. The majority of dojo’s members were amateurs – farmers, craftsmen and merchants – who harbored a strong admiration for bushido culture and a penchant for violent, one could even say “proactive” self-defense. They practiced their swordsmanship, fanboyed all things samurai, and dabbled into a very particular flavor of burgeoning Japanese nationalism, which celebrated the country’s long tradition of isolationist policy.   
  
Surrounded by these people, Toshizo Hijikata thrived.   
  
Toshizo’s own swordsmanship skills were something of a mess – a deadly one, true, as anyone who found himself on the receiving end of his katana could confirm, but a mess nonetheless. He was self-taught, having picked up bits and pieces of different kenjutsu styles when visiting dojos during his days as a medicine seller. So in Isami Kondo, he found an all-round “senpai”: instructor, mentor and friend, who not only had full understanding for Toshizo’s samurai aspirations, but was all too happy to partake in the madness. And Toshizo was ecstatic that finally there was someone who shared his dream.   
  
The Shieikan years were happy times for Toshizo Hijikata – perhaps even the happiest times of his life. It was one of those fleeting periods when dreams suddenly start appearing within reach, but before there’s sacrifice to be made to have them actually come true. Working hard and helping out in the dojo, Toshizo soon grew popular among his newfound friends. Historians note many an anecdote that illustrate the strong camaraderie he had with fellow students, like the one time when they teased the living hell out of him because he received an entire bucket of pickled umeboshi plums – his favorite treat – from a lady admirer, which ended up making the entire dojo stink for days. He even took up writing poetry – because it went without saying that a true samurai was a warrior poet. His haiku pen name was Hogyoku, and there seems to be a general consensus that his verses were godawful, yet somewhat endearing.   
  
The “real” samurai, of course, did not take the Shieikan crowd for serious. For the “real” samurai, they were nothing but peasants playing pretend, aping the sublimity of bushido without truly understanding it. They despised them, ridiculing them every step on the way, if they even bothered to acknowledge their existence in the first place.   
  
But as it happens, life is a grand master of irony. When in 1863 shit hit the fan big time in Kyoto, and the very foundation of the Shogunate started to crumble, the ruling class had no choice but to start relying on people like the Shieikan men in order to survive. 

 

  
~to be continued~

 


	3. The Curtains Fall (A Lesson in History)

THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA - CHAPTER THREE : THE CURTAINS FALL (A LESSON IN HISTORY) 

“May you live in interesting times”

― Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen

  
In popular culture, there is a common misconception that the Boshin War was a clear-cut, ideological conflict between the forces who wanted to modernize Japan and open it up to the rest of the world, and the old regime that desperately fought to preserve the country’s traditional values and cultural identity - the gunmen against the samurai, with a tendency to romanticize the latter, portraying them as noble souls who attempted to resist the viciousness of globalization. History, however, ain’t never that simple, and this interpretation cannot be further from the truth. But in order to figure out what in hell’s name was going on in the bloodiest civil war that the country has ever experienced – and what was Toshizo Hijikata’s personal contribution to this clusterfuck - we need to go back to the beginning, to July 8th 1853, the day of the Kurofune Incident.   
  
To get there, let us begin by establishing some facts about Edo Japan.   
  
The Edo period officially began in the year 1600, when Ieyasu Tokugawa won the battle of Sekigahara, effectively uniting Japan as a single country under one ruler, after centuries of internal conflicts between warmongering feudal states. Ieyasu Tokugawa promptly did two things. First, he firmly and decisively divided the power, establishing the Shogunate ruling system. The Emperor, being the earthly descendant of gods, had nothing but a symbolic, ceremonial role, whereas the actual decision-making ability - the executive power, if you will - was in the hands of the Shogun, a title now belonging to the Tokugawa family. Second, he proclaimed the Decree of Sakoku, the “locked country”, banishing all foreigners from the territory of Japan, from that day until forever.   
  
For two hundred and fifty years, Japan was exclusively Japanese. The only outsiders allowed in the land of the rising sun were the Dutch who had access to the island of Dejima for trade – and if a foreigner ever dared to set foot on Japanese soil outside of the Dejima port, the punishment was death on the spot. Japan developed in isolation, left to its own devices, joyfully cut away from the world, and not regretting it one bit.   
  
Yet on the morning of July 8th 1853, everything changed.   
  
Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy – name’s the same as Chandler from “Friends” –sailed into the Edo Bay with his four steamboats. The steamboats were large and dark and armed with heavy canons. They roared black smoke into the sky, and looked like nothing the Japanese had ever seen before. Soon enough, rumors about the ghastly black ships, the “kurofune”, started spreading like wildfire, causing terror. It was exactly what Commodore Perry wanted. He came to the shores of Japan to offer the Shogun a simple-to-understand ultimatum – you’ll either be a good boy and open your goddamn country for us to access its resources, or I’ll be happy to demonstrate to what extent exactly our American steamboats are superior to any military contraption you Japs might have.   
  
Needless to say, it was an offer the poor Shogun couldn’t refuse.   
  
Cornered by Perry, he signed a bunch of agreements known as the Unequal Treaties, which offered the Americans unprecedented trade privileges. In short, the United States were now allowed to export Japanese goods cheaply, while expensive, imported American goods were given monopoly on the Japanese market. The American profit was ginormous, the Japanese economy quickly ended up in ruins, and the country – traditionally hostile toward all things foreign and pretty damn proud of it – soon found itself overwhelmed by outsiders. They roamed freely in their strange western clothes, their curiosity measuring up only to their arrogance, trying to impose their strange western values, behaving as if everything in this world belonged to them. For Edo Japan, obviously, it was the beginning of the end.   
  
The last 16 years of the Edo Period, starting from the Kurofune Incident in 1853 and ending with the fall of the Ezo Republic in 1869, are called the Bakumatsu. In Japanese, it means “the closing curtains” – and never has there been a more poetic name for downfall. The Bakumatsu was a time of change, one of those moments in history when old values can no longer hold, but no new system is created to replace them. It was a time of paradoxes, of controversies, of beauty and of madness, when things deemed impossible started coming true. And such a time needed its hero – or villain, depending on whom you ask – who would embody all these contradictions of the Bakumatsu. No wonder that Toshizo Hijikata became the poster boy of the closing curtains.   
  
Here’s how it happened.   
  
The root of every revolution lies in economy – once a society reaches the critical mass of angry, starving people, it’s easy to slap on an ideology as the catalyst for rebellion. With Japan’s economy depleted by the Unequal Treaties and them pesky foreigners creeping everywhere, it was a matter of time before someone would point the finger at the Shogun – the dimwit who signed the bloody papers – as the culprit. Thus the Sonno Joi ideology was born, its motto being “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians” – or, let’s get it over with the Shogunate, give the executive power back to our true sovereign, and get rid of these bloody foreigners once and for all, and if we do that, we bet that Japan will overnight become prosperous and wealthy again. The loudest proponents of Sonno Joi were the samurai united in the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance – and funnily enough, many of them descended from clans that had fought against Ieyasu Tokugawa at Sekigahara. These guys, it seemed, were more than happy to hold a grudge for several centuries, and wait for the perfect moment to strike back.   
  
In 1863, as the tensions were boiling, the Shogun decided to pay an official visit to the imperial city of Kyoto. Since that’s where, well, the Emperor’s Palace was, the Sonno Joi movement was particularly strong in the region of Kyoto, with Satsuma-Choshu supporters on every corner. With the Shogun’s arrival approaching, Katamori Matsudaira, the fledgling Lord of Aizu and the man in charge of security in Kyoto, started panicking. He was seriously understaffed, lacking the necessary number of samurai to maintain order in the city, and the Shogun’s visit to Kyoto was a bit like entering the wasp’s nest. So Matsudaira came to this brilliant, creative idea: screw the samurai! If he announced an open call for able-bodied men no matter their origin – the only criteria being their sword skills and their loyalty to the Shogun – he’d surely be able to fill his ranks with enough people to avoid any security disasters while the Shogun was there.   
  
It was the kind of call that the Shieikan guys had waited for all their lives.   
  
So in 1863 they packed their bags and left Hino never to come back, as happy as a clam at high tide, going to the imperial city to become the Shogun’s men.   


 

 

~to be continued~

 


	4. Boys in Blue Uniforms

THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKAZA - CHAPTER FOUR: BOYS IN BLUE UNIFORMS

 

“I dreamt of worldly success once.”

― Miyamoto Musashi

  
  
Katamori Matsudaira’s brilliant plan on getting extra manpower ended up with a most spectacular plot twist, one that feels as if ripped from a totally insane spy movie. You cannot make shit like this up – real history always finds ways to astonish you with how crazy things can get.   
  
Namely, Matsudaira appointed one certain Hachiro Kiyokawa, a respectable samurai, to train and manage the new recruits, forming a group named Roshigumi – roughly translated as “warrior group”, quite an original name indeed. What poor Matsudaira did not now – and here we enter the crazy spy movie territory – was that said Kiyokawa was actually a Sonno Joi supporter in disguise. The guy had hatched this amazing plan to use Matsudaira’s money and resources to gather enough recruits, and then switch sides and go against the Shogun when the time struck.   
  
Enter Isami Kondo and Toshizo Hijikata.   
  
When Kiyokawa’s plan came to light, the two were appalled. No one knew better than them that true samurai always stayed loyal to their master, no matter the cost. Along with eleven more men – most of whom came from the Shieikan – they opposed Kiyokawa and alarmed Matsudaira that things were going south. Stuff happened, and Kiyokawa was prevented from causing any real damage, but Matsudaira’s ego was in shatters – not only that he was made a fool of, but his Roshigumi project fell apart, and the Shogun’s visit was mere days away. He did learn one valuable lesson, though: the samurai were not to be trusted, as the clans were too deeply seeped in politics and ancient grudges to be reliable.   
  
So, along came Katamori Matsudaira’s brilliant plan number two. He summoned Isami Kondo and gleefully informed him that, starting from that day, he was to be the Commander of a new paramilitary group – the Shinsengumi, its name meaning, well, “the new group” – which will be in charge of not only protecting the Shogun while he was in Kyoto, but also of patrolling the streets, making sure that the Shogunate’s peace and order were upheld.   
  
And that’s how the Shinsengumi were born.   
  
Kondo was the appointed Commander, and Toshizo Hijikata was given the position of the Vice-Commander. Aside from their friends from the Shieikan, the rest of the Shinsengumi’s members were recruits who came from all four corners of Japan, answering Matsudaira’s call.   
  
There was Heisuke Todo, a showy young man from Edo who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Izuminokami, the Lord of Tsu, and a daughter of a flower shop owner. There was the kind-hearted, bespectacled Keisuke Yamanami – or Sannan, as historians cannot seem to agree on the kanji reading of his last name – who was a devout Buddhist fearing the western influences. There was Hajime Saito, a tall, hefty man with sharp intelligence and a budding drinking problem, who went by many names, as the group’s spy tasks were often confided to him. There was Sanosuke Harada, who had a large scar across his belly – a nobleman once called him a coward, saying he’d never become a true samurai, and to prove him wrong, Harada gutted himself then and there in a botched seppuku attempt. There was Shinpachi Nagakura, the short-tempered second son of a low-ranked samurai, who quit his family to make a name for himself. And there was Souji Okita, a fellow student of the Shieikan, descendant of an impoverished samurai family, who killed his first man at an inappropriately young age, and desperately tried to hide from his comrades that his lungs were rotting away from tuberculosis.   
  
There were many more, of course, their numbers growing as the group’s reputation spread. They were city boys, peasants, sailors, workers, craftsmen, merchants and minor samurai – some would call them salt of the earth, others scum. And even though Isami Kondo was their leader, Toshizo Hijikata was their idol – and ideologist.   
  
Rumor has it that the pretty Vice-Commander himself – who harbored a soft spot for stylish clothes and was known to blow obscene amounts of money on kimonos specially dyed to make his black, black hair stand out – personally designed the famous Shinsengumi uniforms, with white triangles on sky blue fabric symbolizing the snow-covered top of Mount Fuji. In a world where proper warriors dressed in browns and greys, the Shinsengumi uniforms were screamingly conspicuous – no wonder they became legendary. Yet even though his exact contribution to the history of military fashion cannot be proved, one thing that Toshizo did was rather well documented. Namely, he was the one who wrote the Shinsengumi Code.   
  
The Code was based on bushido, obviously, but it was harsher, stricter. It demanded even more discipline from its followers. It was not allowed to deviate from the “path of a proper man”, upon penalty of death. It was not allowed to leave the Shinsengumi, upon penalty of death. It was not allowed to raise money privately, upon penalty of death. It was not allowed to engage in private fights, upon penalty of death. If the leader of a unit was mortally wounded, all the members of the unit had to fight and die on the spot. And the most dreaded rule was this one: if a Shinsengumi member engaged in a fight, be it on duty or not, and he allowed the enemy to escape, seppuku was ordered.   
  
It’s as if Toshizo wanted his ragtag gang to become more samurai than the real samurai.   
  
The Vice-Commander himself enforced these rules and mercilessly pursued every poor sod who dared to break them. His biographers claim that he had good reasons for this – with such liberal recruitment policies, the Shinsengumi did indeed attract a hell lot of trash, so the only way to keep the group under control was to impose ridiculously strict discipline. But it seems that Toshizo’s cruelty only contributed to the worshiping of his troops – even if they called him “the Demon-eyed Vice-Commander”.   
  
The Shinsengumi were diligent in their duty: they patrolled the streets of Kyoto with the power to arrest anyone they deemed suspicious, or to kill them on the spot if they resisted arrest. Of course, the people of the imperial city were not very happy that a bunch of countryside lowlifes suddenly policed their lives. They called them “the Wolves of Mibu” – Mibu being the Kyoto suburb where the Shinsengumi headquarters were located – and hoped they were nothing but Matsudaira’s silly pet project that would again finish by blowing up in his face. Just give it time.   
  
But then, the Ikedaya Inn affair made them change their minds.   
  
The story goes like this: in early July 1864, the Shinsengumi arrested a dude named Shuntaro Furutaka. It seemed they hit the jackpot with this one – as it happened, Furutaka was a known follower of the Sonno Joi and a supporter of the Choshu side of the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance. His presence in Kyoto meant that something sinister was about to take place. At first, Furutaka held himself strong – no matter how persistently they interrogated him, the poor sod kept his mouth shut. But then, fed up with the lack of results and worried that there was no time to waste, Toshizo Hijikata decided to take the matter into his own hands.   
  
They say the torture was so brutal that Keisuke Yamanami left the building and sat for three hours in the street under heavy rain, because he couldn’t put up with Furutaka’s screams. Toshizo suspended Furutaka by the ankles and hammered 5-inch iron nails into his heels, and then placed candles on top of the wounds, so that melted wax could drip onto open flesh, while the iron was slowly getting white-hot. Furutaka broke down completely, and boy, did he talk. They were to set Kyoto on fire, he said. They were to capture Katamori Matsudaira and execute him publicly. They were to kidnap the Emperor and control his ascent to power. And they were to do all that after they met in the Ikedaya Inn, a small tavern in Northeast Kyoto best known for its pork noodle soup.   
  
On the night of July 8th 1864, exactly eleven years since Commodore Matthew Perry came to Japan with his black ships, the Shinsengumi raided the Ikedaya Inn. The Choshu samurai were there all right, and quite a big bunch of them – legend says that the Shinsengumi were outnumbered five to one. But the boys in blue fought like war gods: they slayed the Choshu and lost only one of their men in return. This defeat was a huge blow to the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance – historians assess that it postponed the beginning of the Boshin War for at least a year, and maybe even directly impacted its outcome, as the weakened Alliance was forced to make some dramatic, unexpected moves. The Ikedaya Inn burned to the ground as collateral damage, but at least the streets of Kyoto were safe. The Shinsengumi successfully saved the day, the city, and the Emperor.   
  
They became heroes.   
  
(There’s an alternative account of this event, however. The Choshu sources claim there were never any plans to burn down Kyoto or, god forbid, kidnap the Emperor. Furutaka gave in under pressure and started spinning fantasies he thought his torturer wanted to hear, while the only reason the large group of samurai was at the Ikedaya on that faithful night was to discuss how to rescue their comrade from his Shinsengumi captors. But we’ll never know the truth.)   
  
At the age of 29, Toshizo Hijikata, the former medicine peddler and failure in life whose family rolled their eyes at him, became one of the most important figures in the imperial city – respected, admired, feared. When he patrolled the streets, oh so beautiful in his sky blue uniform, people would bow to greet him. Geishas entertained him for free, and rumor has it that soon he had as many as six mistresses, one in every district of the city. He was the king of Kyoto.   
  
Yet with the Boshin War around the corner, his reign did not last long.

 

  
  
~to be continued~ 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With Wacky Cherry as Hajime Saito and Tenshi as Souji Okita


	5. We Live a Dying Dream (If You Know What I Mean)

THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA - CHAPTER FIVE: WE LIVE A DYING DREAM (IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN)   


 

"The summer sun, it blows my mind

Is falling down on all that I've ever known

Time will kiss the world goodbye

Falling down on all that I've ever known"

\-- Oasis, "Falling Down"

 

It’s not the Boshin War that triggered the downfall of the Shinsengumi, however. They did it themselves.   
  
After their success with the Ikedaya Inn affair, they became powerful. And power corrupts – that’s one of the lamest, saddest, most predictable human truths.   
  
At first, Kyoto honestly celebrated them as heroes. Yet soon – miserably soon – they started behaving as if the city and its people owed them veneration. They were its saviors, after all. Did them useless samurai stop the fire, perhaps? No, the Shinsengumi did – of course they had the goddamn right to enjoy some privilege! So better show some fucking gratitude, and do it with a smile.   
  
Quickly, badmouthing the group, frowning upon a Shinsengumi member, refusing to provide free services, or simply having the wrong kind of face were good enough reasons for a person to get arrested, accused of supporting the Sonno Joi, tormented and even executed – all in the name of protecting the Shogun’s order. The people of the imperial city didn’t like this one bit, obviously. By 1865, Kyoto found itself locked in an ugly vicious circle: the more the Shinsengumi oppressed the city, the more its people started thinking that those Sonno Joi guys might have a point, and the stronger the Sonno Joi movement grew, the more the Shinsengumi oppressed the city. It was a nauseating merry-go-round.   
  
Strange, historians say that fame didn’t really get to Toshizo Hijikata’s head, even though he was the “face” of the Shinsengumi and did enjoy more than a few perks here and there. He mostly stood with both feet on the ground, genuinely focused on weeding out the Satsuma-Choshu. It was Isami Kondo, the former master of Shieikan and the group’s benevolent leader, who lost his marbles.   
  
Becoming obsessed with grandeur and self-importance, Isami Kondo concluded that their headquarters in Mibu were too “provincial” and “peasant-like”. So he set his eyes out on a much more appropriate accommodation, one that would rival the estates of even the most powerful Kyoto lords: the Nishi Hongan Temple, a glorious Buddhist monastery from the 16th century, one of the most beautiful buildings in the imperial city.   
  
He couldn’t kick the monks in the street just like that, obviously. Hence, he and Toshizo came up with a most devilish plan: the Shinsengumi would simply move into the temple – which, being the saviors of Kyoto, they totally had the right to do – and go on with their daily business. Too bad that “daily business” did not involve only practicing swordsmanship, but also torturing prisoners and making the group members who had violated the Code commit seppuku in the front yard. It didn’t take long before the monks, horrified by all the violence, packed their bags and left on their own, gifting the Shinsengumi with the headquarters of their dreams.   
  
That moment when our ragtag group of wannabe samurai became the most powerful force in Kyoto, living cozily in the Nishi Hongan Temple and basking in centuries old masterworks of Japanese art once made for the first Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa himself – that was the dark pinnacle of the Shinsengumi. From that point on, it’s only spiraling downwards.   
  
The first major Shinsengumi member died full three years before the Boshin War would officially begin.   
  
In 1865, the kind-hearted Keisuke Yamanami deserted from the group, and fled from Kyoto. This wasn’t only a violation of the Code, but also a sort of embarrassment – Yamanami was as highly ranked as Toshizo Hijikata himself, and to have such an eminent member desert was more than awkward. So Toshizo, being the group’s enforcer, went on a chase, taking Souji Okita with him, as the boy was a good friend of Yamanami’s ever since their Shieikan days. It didn’t take long before they found him in the nearby city of Otsu, on the shores of Lake Biwa – if Yamanami wanted to hide, he didn’t do a good job.   
  
In some novels that glamorize the tale of the Shinsengumi, it is written that Yamanami escaped because of a woman – a former geisha, to boot. They eloped together in pursuit of a happy ending, which was as thoughtless and selfish as it was romantic. But historians disagree – no contemporary chroniclers recorded any geisha in Yamanami’s life. They claim that what he did was a carefully planned suicide, which he staged with one purpose in mind – to teach his former comrades a lesson.   
  
See, Yamanami was a deeply religious man, and he just couldn’t let slide what the Shinsengumi did to the monks of the Nishi Hongan Temple. He believed that the group strayed from its path of patriotism, samurai aspirations and loyalty to the Shogun. They became the exact sort of attention-seeking power-grabbing murderers that those who despised them thought they were, Yamanami said to Toshizo and Souji Okita. They betrayed their dream. He tried warning Isami Kondo about it, but the man wouldn’t listen. And now if he had to die to prove his point, so be it.   
  
Toshizo was the witness of Yamanami’s seppuku, while Souji Okita served as the kaishakunin – the friend who delivers the final blow to the samurai by cutting off his head the moment he stabs his stomach. The men returned to Kyoto blood-splattered, traumatized, and deeply aware that nothing would be the same again.   
  
Toshizo Hijikata never spoke about Yamanami’s death. Souji Okita never recovered from it.   
  
Indeed, everything changed afterwards. Slowly but steadily, the Shinsengumi started falling apart. The new recruits, who came in hordes after the Ikedaya Inn affair, couldn’t care less about the samurai ideals – they wanted to be part of the group because, well, it was profitable to be a Shinsengumi. You were able to do lots of nasty shit and get away with it, as long as you didn’t break the Code. The leaders pretended that everything was just fine, of course. Isami Kondo’s head was in the clouds, all lost in pomposity. Souji Okita was crumbling from the illness he was no longer able to hide. Hajime Saito was away on spy business more often than he was around. Todo, Harada and Nagakura did their best to stick together in a group where the feeling of camaraderie paled by the day. As for Toshizo, he tried a bit too hard to keep himself busy with chasing the Sonno Joi supporters. And so, years went by.   
  
Heisuke Todo, the alleged son of the Lord of Tsu, left the Shinsengumi in 1867 with a group of likeminded malcontents whose actual political leanings were more pro-imperial that they were first willing to admit. Isami Kondo allowed them to leave, but then changed his mind and asked for their heads. The group was slaughtered in a rarely ugly incident that involved being invited to a friendly get-together with old comrades and given atrocious amounts of overly strong sake, because drunk people were easier to kill. Some historians say that Nagakura and Harada wanted to arrange for Todo to escape – the boy was, after all, a close friend once. Some even say they had Kondo’s approval to do so. But a new Shinsengumi member, a rookie who never knew Heisuke Todo or heard him talk about his rich, noble father, killed him on the spot. Todo was 23 years old.   
  
In the same year that Heisuke Todo was murdered by the Shinsengumi, the Emperor Komei died. Komei spent most of his life playing the symbolic role of the living god, but in his late years, his active interest in the Sonno Joi movement and attempts at becoming a political player opened a can of worms. His heir - the teenaged Emperor Meiji – continued with the same tune even more loudly, as eager as only a 15-year-old desperate to impress can be. On the opposite side of the field, a year earlier, the position of the Shogun went to Yoshinobu Tokugawa, a distant relative from the third branch of the family and an unlikely candidate to ever get the title. It seemed that the screwed up politics of the Bakumatsu were above his head, as Yoshinobu soon struggled to keep things under control with dissatisfied samurai clans, politicians who plotted his demise, an overly ambitious boy Emperor, and those damn foreigners who still didn’t want to leave.   
  
Outside of the Shinsengumi-controlled Kyoto, the late 1860s were rife with mini-rebellions mostly orchestrated by the Choshu, which were popping up all over Japan and gave a royal headache to poor Yoshinobu. A couple of conflicts almost turned the tables - the only reason that the Alliance kept losing was that the Shogun had foreign military power to back him up when push came to shove. Yoshinobu hit it off with the French – a new force in East Asia, who were undergoing a colonialist renaissance under Napoleon the Third, happily spreading their influence wherever they could. But in spite of foreign help – or maybe because of it – the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance grew stronger with more clans joining them, while the Shogunate slowly collapsed as more and more local lords started ignoring Yoshinobu’s orders (with excuses that honestly sounded like “my dog ate your letter”, only formulated in that overly polite, typically Japanese manner). The stage was set for the revolution to begin.   
  
The year 1867 ended with a dramatic episode in which Yoshinobu abdicated, but changed his mind after being yelled at by other members of the Tokugawa family that one cannot just quit being the motherfucking Shogun and walk away. Still, the consequence of his escapade was that the Shinsengumi had to formally withdraw from Kyoto, given that the Shogunate gave up on policing the city. They left grudgingly but in peace, and set camp near the city, fully trusting that the Shogun knew what he was doing. Yet it was pretty tough being in poor Yoshinobu’s too-tight shoes. Deciding that he ain't no quitter and being bullied into bearing his teeth, he declared a full-on war on the Alliance – and that was, ladies and gents, how the Boshin War began.   
  
In January 1868, the Shogunate forces began their march from Edo to Kyoto. The goal was to officially seize the imperial city, “save” the Emperor Meiji from the poisonous influences of the Satsuma-Choshu, kill anyone who tried to resist, and finally put a full stop to the revolutionary claptrap. With the Shinsengumi stationed near Kyoto to support his own troops and the French having his back, Yoshinobu was looking forward to a short and efficient battle that would at last reinstate the Shogunate rule.   
  
But then.   
  
Remember when I said that, in reality, the Boshin War was anything but the modernists against the traditionalists, the gunmen against the samurai?   
  
Here’s the irony. After wasting too much money, manpower and years playing games with the Shogunate, the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance did a thing. In late 1867, the same guys who began as the nationalistic side in the conflict, as conservative zealots whose motto was “expel the barbarians”, got in touch with – wait for it – the American army. The Americans didn’t like it one bit that the bloody French gained so much power in a country that, essentially, belonged to them. So of course they were happy to provide all the canons, rifles, machinery, modern uniforms and military strategists the Alliance could wish for, if only young Emperor Meiji would be so kind as to allow them to keep their treaties and privileges once he seized the power for himself.   
  
On January 27th 1868, the Shogunate forces – with the Shinsengumi among them – clashed with the rebels of Satsuma, Choshu and Tosa clans near Fushimi, a suburb of Kyoto. It was supposed to be easy. Yoshinobu had more men – his army outnumbered the Alliance 3 to 1. But his troops were wearing the traditional samurai equipment: armors and swords and pikes, with a few rifles here and there. Even his French-trained “elite” units were given outdated second-hand gear, some of it dating as far back as from Napoleon’s conquests. The Alliance, on the other hand, used state-of-the art American weaponry – including one Gatling gun whose sound tore open the skies, petrified the horses, and made the Shogunate infantry drop their pikes and run for their lives.   
  
What followed was a bloodbath.   
  
To put it mildly, the Shogunate army was pummeled into the ground, and then some. The streets were covered with dead bodies ripped apart by American bullets - as if the lesson that Commodore Perry had wanted to teach the Shogun came fifteen years later, delivered by Japanese hands. It was a painful, humiliating defeat that tore the Shogunate pride to shreds. And even though the Battle of Toba-Fushimi was only the first clash in the Boshin War, it was the dying breath of Edo Japan.   
  
Many Shinsengumi lost their lives at Toba-Fushimi. Many more were wounded – cut off limbs, broken bones, spilt entrails – which made them die for days, or forced them to retire from the war. Toshizo Hijikata made it out in one piece, of course. He was deeply horrified by the experience. Somewhat conflicted but ever the pragmatist, knowing very well it was the only option left albeit he didn’t like it at all, Toshizo came to one conclusion – if the Shogunate were to survive, it urgently had to adopt the Western way of life.   
  
So he cut off his waist-long hair and ditched his stylish kimonos, replacing them with a suit of black velvet and burgundy silk made in Paris. And then he started learning how to shoot with a rifle.   


 

 

~to be continued~

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With Wacky Cherry as Hajime Saito.
> 
> Title snatched from the above quoted song by Oasis, which goes surprisingly well in the context of samurai downfall.


	6. The Lost

THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA – CHAPTER SIX: THE LOST

 

“Summer grasses,

All that remains

Of soldiers' dreams”

― Bashō Matsuo

 

Only a few months before the Battle of Toba-Fushimi, in the winter of 1867, the Shogun Yoshinobu Tokugawa did a very special thing for the Shinsengumi: he gave every single major member of the group the title of hatamoto. A hatamoto was a personal retainer of the Shogun – it was the highest rank and the greatest honor that could be bestowed upon a samurai in Edo Japan. You couldn’t do better than that. It was the first time that such a title was given to a group of former farmers, merchants, workers, and craftsmen – it didn’t only make them equal to the samurai, it turned them into something akin to aristocracy. It was a dream come true – and more than they had ever dared to dream.   
  
Too bad that, in the last years of the Bakumatsu as the world was falling down, the Shogun’s decrees no longer carried the same weight. The title of hatamoto didn’t mean anything anymore. It was nothing but a hollow word, a fancy piece of paper. A lie.   
  
Toshizo Hijikata was painfully aware of that. After the Toba-Fushimi disaster, he did his best to reorganize the Shinsengumi – or what was left of them – and put them back on the military map. He engaged French trainers, arranged the purchase of firearms, and ordered the group members to start wearing western clothes – those sky blue uniforms may have looked pretty, but they were damn impractical for guns and rifles, as the loose sleeves were getting tangled everywhere. He formed an unexpectedly close bond with Jules Brunet, a French military advisor in Tokugawa service who had participated in the Battle of Toba-Fushimi – an odd friendship that would last until the bitter end. Brunet told him a lot about European warfare and tactics, and Toshizo did his best to pick it up. Yet after Toba-Fushimi, the Shinsengumi were decimated. New recruits were scarce – especially after the group lost their hold of Kyoto, and it became blatantly obvious that the Shogunate was the losing side in this quagmire. At some point, the group was so desperate as to offer unlimited sake as an incentive for signing up – but as you can imagine, people who joined a military faction because they were promised free booze didn’t make the best candidates for turning into disciplined, modern, Napoleon-style troops.   
  
Toshizo Hijikata’s sad attempts to reboot the Shinsengumi after hitting rock bottom reflect Yoshinobu’s own efforts to urgently remodel the Shogunate army. Indeed, all that remained of Shogunate’s money was promptly invested into warships, canons and uniforms, all provided by the French. But, as the saying goes, Yoshinobu was a day late and a dollar short – just because the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance was the first to fully adopt the Western weaponry, they had the upper hand, and soon enough they were winning on all fronts, no matter how hard the Shogunate tried. And right there, that’s the paradox of the Boshin War – in the end, there was no “samurai” side, only two factions in a civil war backed by two different foreign governments fighting for power.   
  
When the Shinsengumi quit Kyoto, Toshizo tried to keep the group afloat, but their Commander Isami Kondo – whose pomposity was notorious even before things went to seven hells – wasn’t helping. The poor man flipped out completely. It’s not only that he refused Western clothing and frowned upon firearms. It’s that, unlike Toshizo, he took the title of hatamoto very, very seriously. Before long, he went around their understaffed, misery-stricken camp acting like a true samurai lord, and treating other group members – many of whom were his comrades from the Shieikan – as mere underlings. Kondo took it too far – when he asked his former brothers-in-arms to address him with honorifics reserved for nobility, Shinpachi Nagakura, who’d always been known for having a temper, couldn’t put up with it any longer. After writing a long and detailed petition which could be summarized as “101 Things I Hate about Isami Kondo” (Nagakura had a remarkable talent for words – a detail that would come up as important in the later years), he theatrically quit the group, and took Sanosuke Harada with him. This time, no one tried to stop them. No one mentioned the Code, no one asked for their heads. They just let them walk away.   
  
For a while, there were rumors that Sanosuke Harada – the man with the scar across his belly – left Japan for good and moved to China where he became the leader of a group of masked bandits and lived happily ever after, raiding merchant caravans all over Manchuria. While amusing, this story is sadly unfounded. History says that soon after quitting the Shinsengumi, Harada got reunited with his wife and child, and settled for a peaceful life in Edo. But peace was a fleeting matter during the Boshin War. The family bliss lasted but only a few months – the Alliance forces, now officially the army of Emperor Meiji, went straight for Edo with the aim to break the center of Tokugawa power. Ending up trapped in Edo under siege, Sanosuke Harada had no choice but to take up arms again, and go defend the city on behalf of the Shogun. He got shot in the Battle of Ueno, and died two days later after his wounds got infected. He was 29.   
  
As for Shinpachi Nagakura, a few months after quitting, the man disappeared off the face off the earth.   
  
Yoshinobu Tokugawa, the last Shogun, officially threw the towel on April 11th 1868, surrendering the city of Edo along with all reins of power to young Emperor Meiji. Yoshinobu’s letters to his wife Mikako reveal that he was thankful that it was finally over. It may seem absurd, but his resignation, however, did not end the war. The Tokugawa regime’s grip on Japan was too strong for too long, and that ain’t a thing that dissolves overnight. Hence, some factions simply decided to carry on fighting against the Emperor – perhaps out of fear of change, or loyalty for Tokugawa, or mere inertia, or good old spite, which is a trait one can always count on to result in all sorts of stupidities. And the Shinsengumi – god bless their silly, stubborn asses – kept on fighting.   
  
The Shinsengumi participated in two more battles that the Shogunate-without-the-Shogun would lose – at Koshu-Katsunuma and Nageyarama, each time ending up with fewer men, shattered hopes, and less reasons to persevere. And yet they kept on fighting.   
  
In May 1868, a full month after Yoshinobu resigned, the remains of the group ended up surrounded by Meiji forces at Nageyarama. Hoping to obtain safe passage for his men, Isami Kondo decided to follow the example of some other eminent pro-Tokugawa lords and surrender. Toshizo advised him against it, yet Kondo insisted it was the right thing to do. Many lords did it and it turned out just fine for them, Kondo said. They got only a slap on the wrist and were allowed to retire in dignity, living calmly under house arrest. So if Kondo surrendered like a proper lord, he’d be treated with respect, the Shinsengumi would be allowed to retreat and heroically disband, and all would be right with the world.   
  
On May 14th, Kondo gave himself over to the Meiji government.   
  
But hatamoto or not, Isami Kondo was no real samurai. There were no centuries of family connections and blue blood behind him – for the new government, he was just a nasty little bugger who put them through hell during the years his troops were terrorizing Kyoto, a former peasant who was lucky enough to climb the social ladder so fucking high. And now he was about to fall from it. Painfully quickly, it became obvious that house arrest was not what the new government had in mind for Isami Kondo. As soon as he realized he was doomed, he asked his captors to arrange for him to commit seppuku. Yet seppuku was an honor that only the real samurai could have – and that’s what Kondo, as they reiterated many times, was not. So in the end he was executed like a common criminal. In the early morning of May 17th, Isami Kondo was beheaded in the back yard of an improvised prison in Itabashi, near Edo. His severed head was sent to Kyoto where it was put on a spike and displayed on the bridge across the Sanjo River, very near where the Ikedaya Inn once stood. It is said that many citizens of Kyoto came to spit in his face. But it is also said that many others wept.   
  
(While Kondo’s head was rotting on that bridge, on the other side of the country, in Edo, a man was dying alone. Souji Okita was left abandoned by his comrades in a rented, empty house, ravaged by his disease and barely able to stand. Only his sister Mitsu came to visit and bring him food. Mitsu claimed that during his last days, Souji became obsessed with a black cat that supposedly came to the yard every afternoon to watch him die and gloat. He said that the cat was the spirit of Keisuke Yamanami who came to claim his dues, and begged for someone to chase it away. Souji Okita died on July 19th at the age of 25, choking on his own blood, after shambling around the yard trying to slay the black cat with his katana. Witnesses swore that there never were any cats matching the description in the neighborhood. But who knows with them cats.)   
  
In late May, a few weeks after Kondo’s execution, the Shinsengumi – now counting less than a few dozen men – participated in the Battle of Utsunomiya Castle. That one was a real bitch. At first, the Shogunate forces were winning – they even managed to capture the goddamn Castle, in an attack led by Toshizo Hijikata himself. But the victory did not last long – soon, the new government sent reinforcements from the south, and the Shogunate troops were forced to withdraw, in a rush, suffering heavy blows yet again. Toshizo was wounded – a bullet to his left shoulder. Smashed bones, torn ligaments. A permanent disability.   
  
The summer of 1868 was a difficult one for Toshizo Hijikata. According to his letters to Hikogoro Sato – the apothecary brother-in-law whom he’d left behind in Hino, even though they never lost touch – it seemed he was struggling with depression. Despite his efforts, the Shinsengumi now existed in name only. He saw their degradation as a personal defeat. Kondo’s death weighed heavily on him. He felt guilty not only that he was unable to prevent the execution, but also that he’d allowed his old friend to go off the rails oh so spectacularly. His wound was hurting. He had trouble sleeping, and when he did, he had nightmares. For the first time in his life, he was ridden with insecurities.   
  
That fall, at the Battle of Bonari Pass – yet another defeat for the Shogunate – Toshizo gave the title of the Shinsengumi Commander to Hajime Saito, the only remaining core member of the group. He used his wound as an excuse, said he wasn’t fit to lead. Saito decided that the Shinsengumi would seek out Katamori Matsudaira, the man who’d created them, and support the war efforts of his Aizu clan, a rare pocket of Shogunate loyalists that still resisted the new government. Toshizo, however, shook his head. He wouldn’t be going with them. It was time to part ways. He’d sail north, he said. To Ezo.   
  
And we finally arrive to the last act of our story: the Ezo Republic. The mother of all lost causes.   
  


 

~to be continued~ 

 


	7. The Hatamoto of Ezo

 

THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA – FINAL CHAPTER: THE HATAMOTO OF EZO

 

  
"For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter."  
\-- Janet Frame

 

  
Take a look at a map of Japan. See where Hokkaido is?   
  
It’s the northernmost island of the Land of the Rising Sun, much more scarcely populated than the rest of the country. Its climate is rough, with chilling, snowy winters and cool summers. It is best known for amazing wildlife: Hokkaido is where the Japanese cranes live, one of the country’s most celebrated symbols – those majestic white birds with black wings, golden beaks and patches of blood-red on their heads. Nowadays, the island mostly lives off tourism – refreshingly cold summers, winter ski centers and nature parks attract a lot of travelers. But some hundred years ago, Hokkaido was the proverbial middle of nowhere, the back of beyond where nobody wanted to go. There was nothing there but snow, winds, dark forests, and unruly Ainu tribes. And, well, cranes.   
  
Back in the olden days, the island of Hokkaido was known under a different name: Ezo.   
  
In the fall of 1868, when it became obvious that the Shogunate forces were losing the war all over the place – not to mention that, for crying out loud, they were a Shogun short – a man named Takeaki Enomoto decided to do something about it. Enomoto was quite an interesting dude. Descendant of an old samurai family that served the Tokugawa clan for centuries and a die-hard Shogunate loyalist, he was actually educated in Europe, as the first generation of Japanese officials to see the world after the country had opened its borders. He was also remarkably young – only 31 years old when he was appointed Admiral of the Japanese Navy. So when the Meiji government asked him to pledge loyalty to the new regime and give over the warships that were under his command, he responded with a juicy “well you know what, fuck you too”. And then he took his fleet and sailed north, way up far north, to that one part of Japan that nobody cared about – the island of Ezo.   
  
Upon arriving to Hakodate, Ezo’s largest port town, Admiral Enomoto made a dramatic announcement. He called upon all those who remained faithful to the Shogunate and rejected the new order to stop fighting in the mainland – that war was already lost. Instead, they should come to him, up north to Ezo. There, together, they’d join forces and create something new – the Republic of Ezo, a place where they would uphold the old values and continue living as they did under the Shogunate.   
  
Enomoto’s words exploded like a thousand firecrackers. Soon enough, Tokugawa loyalists began withdrawing from the mainland and travelling north. It is estimated that as many as several thousand people came to Ezo. Not all of them were samurai or soldiers: there were many administrators and clerks who lost their positions since the government changed, or simple enthusiasts who were afraid of what the new regime might bring. There was Jules Brunet too, with a unit of French officers – even though France had dropped the Shogunate like a hot potato the moment when Yoshinobu resigned, Brunet decided to go against his direct orders and remain with his Japanese friends. And of course, there was Toshizo Hijikata. He was among the first to arrive, in the fall of 1868, on the famous warship called Kaiyo Maru, together with Keisuke Otori, a high level Tokugawa military commander with whom he had fought at the Battle of Utsunomiya Castle.   
  
The Republic of Ezo was proclaimed on December 25th 1868. Its aim, as the Declaration of Independence stated, was to “secede from the nation of Japan and carry on with samurai traditions unmolested”.   
  
Here’s yet another paradox of the Boshin War: in spite of insisting on “samurai traditions” in the Declaration, the Ezo Republic was way more modern and progressive than the Meiji regime. The first democratic elections ever held in the history of Japan happened in Ezo, with Takeaki Enomoto ending up as the elected President. Ezo’s governmental system was American – there were ministries for each area of importance, with Keisuke Otori becoming the Minister of Army, and Toshizo Hijikata his Deputy. The Republic’s Constitution was based on the pillars of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité, Monsieur Brunet’s personal touch that he was particularly proud of, as pages and pages of bragging about it in his diary could confirm. The Ezo Republic adopted its flag and its anthem. It sent letters to the diplomatic missions of the United States, Russia, France and the Netherlands asking for international recognition. It also filed a famous petition to Meiji’s Imperial Court. In this document, the Republic clearly stated that it still recognized Emperor Meiji as the country’s supreme, divine sovereign – it only had a problem with the new Satsuma-Choshu government. Therefore, Ezo proposed to end the Boshin War and continue living with Japan in peaceful coexistence, as two independent nations under one Emperor. In other words, the only thing the Republic asked for was to be left alone.   
  
But young Emperor Meiji was a smart boy, and he had even smarter advisors around him. And they were merciless.   
  
In a way, it makes perfect sense why the Emperor and his new government had to crush the Ezo Republic. After centuries of samurai-dominated Tokugawa Shogunate, the regime was freshly changed. The country was still vulnerable and unstable – and instability was a fertile ground for all sorts of silly ideas for potential revolutions. Showing mercy to the remnants of the old regime - by essentially letting them have their way exactly how they wanted it - would be a sign of weakness. And this was not a moment for the Emperor to appear weak. So the Imperial Court responded to the Ezo petition with a brief, simple-to-understand offer.   
  
Surrender or die.   
  
It was cold in Ezo that winter. Fucking freezing.   
  
The Republic’s leaders were fully aware that once the weather got better, the Imperial forces would launch a full-on campaign against them. So they did their best to make use of the winter break, working hard against the snow and wind and chill that crept into their bones. The idea was to fortify the port of Hakodate in an attempt to resist a longer siege of the island, particularly reinforcing the Goryokaku Fortress, the star fort on top of the city. As Deputy Minister of Army, Toshizo played a very prominent role in these preparations – both in terms of placing the Goryokaku Fortress under full control of the Republic, and in planning the fortifications. He was relentless, historians say. In his diary, Jules Brunet wrote how impressed he was by Toshizo’s dedication and wit in those crucial days. “The man is truly remarkable,” Brunet remarked. “If he were born in Europe, he’d be no less than a general.”   
  
Toshizo was a doer by nature: being busy in Hakodate did him good. It gave him tasks to solve: a sense of purpose. A feeling that his dream was not dead yet. Yet the preparations did not last forever, and winters in Ezo were long. Soon enough, he ran out of things to do.   
  
So he waited.   
  
He went on walks around the fortress, checking and double checking that all was well. He wrote more of his godawful poetry. He penned long letters to his family in Hino – some of which he sent, some of which he burned. He watched the snow and the grey winter skies in Hakodate port, listening to the winds. He played cards with Jules Brunet. Hell, he probably even observed the cranes, since they were right there all right. He had all the time in the world to think about dead comrades and lost battles and life choices and dreams and times a-changin’ and the goddamn impending doom that loomed over them, as it was pretty obvious that no matter the fortifications, the Imperial Army would crush them like bugs come spring. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he tried not to think at all.   
  
But he waited.   
  
The Imperial Army began its final push against the Ezo Republic in late April 1869. They too had used the winter to prepare for invasion: they obtained more American warships and guns. At Toba-Fushimi, only one Gatling gun had wreaked havoc – now they owned several. Hence it’s not a surprise that the Empire quickly started winning against the Republic’s forces, sinking their ships and breaking down their barricades. Still, in spite of its obvious disadvantage, Ezo offered impressive resistance. It took a full month for the Imperial Army to finally begin a land invasion with 7000 infantry soldiers. The port of Hakodate was well defended and the Goryokaku Fortress stood strong – but the Ezo forces were tired, drained after the long winter and a string of defeats. It was obvious they wouldn’t be able to resist for long.   
  
In early May 1869, just around his 34th birthday, Toshizo Hijikata understood that the Ezo Republic would fall in a matter of days.   
  
It was the season of blooming cherry trees – in Ezo’s cool climate, they blossomed much later than in the rest of the country. It was a good season for a samurai’s story to end – even though he was never a real samurai.   
  
Starting from May, Toshizo Hijikata began spending the days alone in his room. He received very few visitors – mostly just the Minister of Army Keisuke Otori, who informed him about the progress of the land invasion. On May 3rd in the middle of the night, he summoned his page, Tetsunosuke Ichimura, a boy who’d been with the Shinsengumi since his early teens. Tetsunosuke would later recount that Toshizo was all dressed in white that night. He gave the boy his two swords, a lock of his blue-black hair, a letter, a photograph – the one in which he’s sitting in a chair dressed in his Parisian suit, and a poem. A death poem, true to samurai traditions. He wrote it himself, of course – and while its lyrical quality is indeed dubious, the poem aptly reveals his matter-of-factly outlook on life clashing with his soul of a dreamer:   
  
“Though my body may decay on the island of Ezo,   
My spirit guards my lord in the east.“   
  
It was also the ultimate grand gesture of samurai martyrdom – even in death, he’d protect the very Emperor whose forces put him in the grave. Toshizo then ordered Tetsunosuke to ride out immediately, find a way to reach Hikogoro Sato in Hino, and deliver him these items as mementos. He also ordered the boy not to cry.   
  
On the morning of May 11th, Toshizo Hijikata asked for his horse to be readied. He said, with the land invasion ongoing, one of the first places to fall would be the Benten Daiba fort in the suburbs of Hakodate. There were men who’d once been Shinsengumi members in that fort, he said. He could not leave them.   
  
So he ordered the gates to open and rode out of the Goryokaku Fortress alone, galloping straight into the battle mayhem where the Imperial forces awaited with their Gatling guns.   
  
We can assume that he hoped for a quick death – glorious, in battle, in mid-movement, like in one of those romantic novels that Isami Kondo used to like so much.   
  
What happened was that a rain of bullets killed his horse, while hitting him in the lower back, shattering his abdomen and crippling his legs. He fell on the ground, and the dead animal collapsed on top of him. And then he laid there alone, broken and paralyzed, in the pool of blood, staring at the sky, and all under the fucking cherry blossom trees.   
  
It took him hours to die.   


 

 

~to be continued~

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hijikata's death poem calligraphy by Teika


	8. Epilogue: A Memory (The Living and the Dead)

THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA – EPILOGUE: A MEMORY (THE LIVING AND THE DEAD)

 

“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” ― Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton

 

The short-lived Ezo Republic fell exactly one week after Toshizo Hijikata’s death.   
  
The President, Admiral Takeaki Enomoto, wanted to go down fighting – but Keisuke Otori, the Minister of Army, was decidedly against it. It seemed that having to retrieve Toshizo’s broken body from the battlefield had left quite a strong impression on him as to what happened to those who sought death in a blaze of glory. “If it’s dying that you want,” Otori told the President, “you can do that anytime.”   
  
So the men surrendered and their lives were spared.   
  
Both Enomoto and Otori spent a few years in prison. Even though he was accused of high treason, the Satsuma-Choshu government pardoned Takeaki Enomoto in 1872. Not only that they released him from imprisonment, but they also invited him to join their ranks. It wasn’t done out of the kindness of their hearts – neither the Satsuma nor the Choshu harbored any love for the Tokugawa – but out of pure pragmatism. They figured that Enomoto’s European education would come in handy in the process of modernization reforms that young Emperor Meiji was implementing. And so Takeaki Enomoto became part of the new ruling elite, rising higher in social ranks than any other former Tokugawa loyalist. His particular pet project became promoting Japanese emigration to the New World – United States and South America in particular. He died in 1908, at the age of 72. As for Keisuke Otori, after being released from prison in the early 1870’s, he also took up employment with the Meiji regime. He became a diplomat and ended his career as ambassador to China and Korea. He passed away in 1911.   
  
The French government sent a ship to evacuate Jules Brunet and his men from Ezo and smuggle them to the colonies in Indochina. After he returned to Paris, Brunet discovered he was a wanted man: the Meiji government had even put a price on his head and asked for extradition from France. Yet his actions in the Boshin War earned him immeasurable popularity in his homeland: he gave press interviews, published his diaries and memoires, toured the country to tell stories. So the only disciplinary measure Brunet suffered for disobeying orders and getting involved in the Ezo Republic was six months of suspension. After that, he proceeded to have a brilliant career in the French army: he played a prominent role in the Franco-Prussian War, became the key figure in suppressing the Paris Commune, and in 1898 he received the position of Chief of Staff of the French Military, with the rank of Brigadier General. In the late 1870’s, thanks to the lobbying of Takeaki Enomoto, Jules Brunet was pardoned by the Meiji government, and even decorated as a national hero of the Order of the Rising Sun – the medal is nowadays on display in the Embassy of Japan in Paris. Brunet died in 1911, at the age of 73. What is little known is that Brunet was also a talented painter – his aquarelles portraying the last days of the Shogunate and life in the Ezo Republic are an unexpectedly warm testimony of his time in Japan, much more emotional than his diaries. Oh, and you know that movie with Tom Cruise, “The Last Samurai”, about an American officer who comes to Japan to help the Imperial forces but ends up supporting the rebels instead? In real life, there was never any American officer switching sides – it was Jules Brunet all along.   
  
Young Emperor Meiji grew up to become Meiji the Great – one of the most powerful and beloved Emperors that Japan has ever had. The period of his reign is known as the Meiji Restoration – times when the land of the rising sun went through a string of political, social, cultural and industrial reforms, emerging as one of the Great Powers on the world stage. As an Emperor, Meiji took a very active role in ruling the country, and he can be personally credited for the birth of Japan as a unified, modern nation. When he passed away in 1912, a Shinto shrine was built in his honor in an iris garden in Tokyo – the name he’d given to the city that was once Edo when he’d moved his Imperial Court there – which is now one of the most important landmarks of the Japanese capital.   
  
When he resigned in 1868, Yoshinobu Tokugawa, the last Shogun, led a quiet life in the province of Shizuoka. Some thirty years after the end of the Boshin War, in 1902, Emperor Meiji allowed him to return to Tokyo and restore the Tokugawa family line. He was even given an honorary position in the parliament, as a sign of gratitude for all that the Tokugawa family had done for Japan. But Yoshinobu cared little for politics. He took up many hobbies in his retirement: oil painting, archery, hunting, cycling – and photography. His photographs of the streets of Tokyo capture the remarkable moment of change, of how the city evolved from samurai Edo into the modern, industrial capital. And little did the citizens of Tokyo know that the funny old dude taking pictures with his clunky camera was actually the last Shogun himself. He died peacefully in 1913, at the age of 76.   
  
The page Tetsunosuke Ichimura reached Hino three months after the Battle of Hakodate. There, he fulfilled his duty and delivered the swords, the letter, the photograph, the lock of hair and the poem to Hikogoro Sato and his wife Nobu, Toshizo’s sister. It is said that everybody wept – their spoiled, dream-headed prettyboy who’d everyone once deemed a loser came such a long way indeed. Afterwards, Tetsunosuke continued living with the Sato family until his untimely death in 1871, from an unspecified illness, at age 19. The items he brought are now kept in Toshizo Hijikata’s Museum in Hino. The Museum is curated by Toshizo’s descendants from the Sato family, and they personally take visitors on tours, willing to spend hours chatting with the Shinsengumi enthusiasts from all over the world.   
  
After parting ways with Toshizo Hijikata in the fall of 1868, the Shinsengumi, led by Hajime Saito as their Commander, joined the forces of Katamori Matsudaira. They fought by his side in the Battle of Aizu – and they lost. It was the last mainland battle of the Boshin War – and it is also considered to be the official end of the Shinsengumi.   
  
Katamori Matsudaira, the man who created the Shinsengumi, spent the next few years living under house arrest – the fate that Isami Kondo had hoped for, once. Upon his release, he retired from public life and became the Chief Priest of the Nikko Toshogu Shrine – a Shinto temple in which Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first Shogun, was worshiped as a deity. Matsudaira died in the temple in 1893, aged 57. Today, his Nikko Toshogu Shrine is a UNESCO world heritage site and one of the most popular tourist destinations in Japan.   
  
The last Commander of the Shinsengumi Hajime Saito was arrested after the Battle of Aizu along with Katamori Matsudaira – but he managed to slip under his captors’ radar by giving out one of his many false names. He then assumed the name Goro Fujita – a fresh one, never used before – and went to live in Tokyo, where he got married, popped out three sons, and in 1874 joined the Metropolitan Police Department. Relying on the vast skills he had acquired during his Shinsengumi years – most notably spying and intelligence gathering – he quickly rose in the ranks and became a renowned homicide detective. He retired from the police in 1891, having reached the rank of Chief Inspector. Yet peaceful pensioner lifestyle wasn’t his cup of tea, so soon he started working as a night guard for the Tokyo Museum, and then as a clerk in the Tokyo Women’s High School, which had been established as part of Emperor Meiji’s educational reforms. There, the last Commander of the Shinsengumi could observe a whole new generation of Japanese youth growing up with different values and goals, to live in a country oh so unlike the one in which he had been born. Hajime Saito died at the age of 71 on September 28th 1915, from stomach ulcer caused by his long-term battle with alcoholism – a habit that got particularly nasty in his old age. His explicit wish was to be buried in a grave with no name – he said he’d had too many of those in his lifetime.   
  
As for Shinpachi Nagakura, well… That dude’s fate was just special.   
  
Remember how he disappeared in 1868? He managed to pull off that trick by promptly marrying a nice young woman (a doctor’s daughter, no less), taking her last name, and going off to live with her family in a small town called Otaru up north, far and away from any line of conflict. There, under the name of Yoshie Sugimura, he lived a very, very quiet life for decades. He worked as a swordsmanship instructor for prison guards in the local penitentiary and retired rather early to spend time with his family. The most notable thing that happened to him was beating the crap out of some yakuza dudes who’d bullied his grandson – the poor sods had no idea that the crooked old man walking with a stick could knock them around as easily as that.   
  
But after the death of Emperor Meiji Japan began to change once again. Now that the country had become part of the world and a major player in the global scene, there was a sudden resurgence of interest in the national past. See, during the Meiji Restoration Japan was focused only on moving forward, so samurai stuff was considered “old-fashioned”, “outdated” and even “primitive”. But under the new Emperor Taisho, the country slowly started building back its national identity, and the new Japanese became interested in the lifestyle and traditions of their forefathers. Samurai stories came to be very fashionable – told, retold and sentimentalized to eternity and back, with brutality of the bushido diluted to make room for romance and grandiosity. The tale of the Shinsengumi – who they were, how they lived and why they died – suddenly started getting attention. So in the spring of 1913, at the age of 74, almost half a century after he’d quit the group angry at Isami Kondo, Shinpachi Nagakura made a life-changing decision. He contacted the local newspapers in Otaru, introduced himself with his real name and Shinsengumi rank – and said he was ready for an interview.   
  
The old kook had always had his way with words. In a series of interviews that were later reprinted by national newspapers and even published as a best-selling book, Shinpachi Nagakura painted this absolutely amazing picture of the Shinsengumi. He didn’t outright forge the facts – but he did exaggerate a great deal, embellishing, romanticizing, leaving out much of the nasty stuff, making them appear braver, stronger, larger than life. In his stories, his old, long-dead comrades started living again, becoming better and more perfect versions of themselves – until they met their tragic ends, making the readers mourn. And the book sold tens of thousands of copies. It’s Nagakura’s interviews that finally sealed the fate of the Shinsengumi as one of the best known and most popular episodes of Japanese history. In the years to come, writers, movie-makers and artists would rely on Nagakura’s account in creating their own stories about the Shinsengumi, making the tale grow, evolve, and turn into an outright legend.   
  
(You may wonder how we know how much of Shinpachi Nagakura’s tale is truth, and how much of it is, well, creative interpretation. On one hand, obviously, there are contemporary chronicles about the Shinsengumi in which one can find many hard facts. On the other hand – and this is way more interesting – in 1998, descendants of Shinpachi Nagakura found in his belongings a few notebooks with his old diaries which he had kept during his Shinsengumi years. Written in a fresh, cynical style, the diaries openly speak both about the feeling of camaraderie in the group, and how things went to the dogs and fell apart afterwards. His diaries were also published, and they make for a fascinating read – especially if you compare them to the interviews he gave half a century later. Kondo’s portrayal, for instance, is radically different.)   
  
Shinpachi Nagakura passed away on January 5th 1915 from blood poisoning caused by an infected tooth. He was buried like a national hero.   
  
But there is a little known fact about Shinpachi Nagakura that, perhaps, concludes the story of Toshizo Hijikata in the most suitable way.   
  
In his late years, Nagakura got hooked on movies – those black and white, silent movies that were still a wonder in the early 20th century world. He was particularly fond of foreign films, with lavish costumes, swashbuckling adventures and lots of melodrama, set in faraway countries he’d never seen in his life. “Since I have been alive for a long time, I was able to see such marvelous civilization,” he said once. “It is a very strange feeling. I wonder, if Kondo and Hijikata… If Hijikata-san lived in different times and saw a movie, with what expression on his face would he watch it? And what kind of dreams would it give him? ”   


 

 


	9. Aftwerword

AFTERWORD – THE TOSHIZO HIJIKATA PROJECT   


 

So you made it through my overly long retelling of the life and deeds of my favorite history’s tragic hero, Toshizo Hijikata. Congratulations – and thank you for sticking with me. It’s been a wild ride – this is a story that means so much to me, and putting it on paper turned into quite an emotional journey. It began as something that was supposed to be small - just writing a few lines about why I decided to do a particular cosplay and who this dude actually was, given he’s a historical figure and all. But as you know by now, I love telling stories. It's stronger than me. So "a few lines" evolved, mutated, escalated out of control, and became the Project with the capital P, this thing that kept me awake at night because I was so high on adrenaline that I couldn’t fall asleep. And when I did I had funny dreams.   
  
Writing the story of Toshizo Hijikata consumed me. It reminded me why I fell for him some 15 years ago when I’d first discovered the tale of the Shinsengumi. It made me cry, made me angry at him for doing what he did, made me proud of him for doing what he did, made me restless, made me feel ridiculously close to a wannabe samurai dude who died like 150 years ago, and didn’t give me a peace of mind until I finished the last chapter and finally got it out of my system.   
  
It is over. It is done.   
  
On to the afterword.   
  
First things first: a major disclaimer. I ain’t no historian, and this is not a professional work. I’m just an amateur who enjoys history and really, REALLY likes telling stories. What I wrote here falls somewhere between an essay and – let’s call it for what it is – a piece of fan fiction. I tried to relate the facts as accurately and interestingly as I could, though. My sources were the famous Samurai Archives; a very helpful Russian blog called bakumatsu.ru where one can find all sorts of pirated history articles and loads of pictures; the amazing site Shinsengumi no Makoto which is now sadly defunct as its domain expired last fall; the book “Samurai Tales: Courage, Fidelity and Revenge in the Final Years of the Shogun” by Romulus Hillsborough; and excerpts from the memoires of Shinpachi Nagakura (both versions) and Jules Brunet. Still, I am aware that the story I told is neither flawless, nor complete.   
  
Untangling the facts was rather difficult at certain points, as sometimes sources don’t match – in Nagakura’s writing alone you can find two very different versions of same events. And don’t get me started on the dates – trying to set the timeline straight was a nightmare, because some sources used the old Japanese lunar calendar, some used the Western calendar, and some used both. I tried to consistently stick to the Japanese calendar because it made more sense in the context (if you do some digging on your own, don’t be surprised to find that Ezo Republic was founded in January 1869, or that Hijikata died on June 20th), but it is quite possible that some errors slipped in. Don’t kill me for it. In order to make the story flow more naturally, I also omitted certain characters (forgive me, Susumu Yamazaki, Kai Shimada and Genzaburo Inoue), political intrigues (the Boshin War was more of a clusterfuck that I managed to describe here – for instance, the Brits and the Dutch were also involved, although not as prominently as the Americans and the French, and the Satsuma clan tried to switch sides several times before finally finding their happiness in the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance), internal scandals (the Kamo Serizawa affair which marked the beginning of the Shinsengumi, or the mess with Kashitaro Ito and his Guardians of the Tomb in 1867 which I mentioned only briefly in relation to Heisuke Todo’s death), or murder mysteries (writing about the assassination of Ryoma Sakamoto would require an extra chapter dedicated to who the hell Ryoma Sakamoto was and why he was so important). While interesting, these are all side stories that do not change the flow or the outcome of Toshizo Hijikata’s personal tale, so this time I had to do without them. The only way to include ~everything~ would be to write a goddamn book.   
  
So in the end, as lame as it sounds, I “followed my heart” and told the story how I thought was right. What you’ve just read is a highly personal rendition of a well-known episode of Japanese history – and with all its simplifications, dramatization and possible errors, it is mine, in a deeply intimate sense. Like a love letter of sorts. 

I discovered the Shinsengumi many years ago, thanks to anime and manga, of course. It’s obvious why the boys in blue keep recurring in pop-culture: everybody likes stories about dreamers whose dreams come true – even if it comes at a horrible price. Plus, depending on whose side you take in the Boshin War, it’s equally easy to turn them into heroes who fought a battle lost in advance just because it was the right thing to do, or to vilify them as a group of brutes that bullied the citizens of Kyoto oppressing every attempt at change. And it’s easy to see Toshizo Hijikata’s personal appeal – vain yet with a stoic nature, pragmatic yet with unshakeable ideals, brave yet sometimes so silly, pure of heart yet with an obvious dark side, and above all oh so beautiful, he’s the ultimate Byronic hero that makes for a perfect heartthrob of historical fiction. He stars in many novels, TV shows, anime, manga and video games – from the cult shounen comedy “Gintama”, to NHK’s live action soap opera “Shinsengumi”, or the recent anime and manga “Drifters” by Kouta Hirano, author of “Hellsing”, in which he’s one of the main villains and has the superpower of summoning the spirits of his fallen comrades. But as far as Toshizo Hijikata’s pop-culture appearances are concerned, of course I have my own list of favorites.   
  
Honorable mention goes to “Ayakashi Ayashi”, an obscure anime from the mid-2000’s which had the potential to be something truly smart and different, yet ended up as a sad example of what happens when a good script is ruined by bad direction. The anime is set in the early 1850’s and deals with supernatural investigations in the city of Edo. At some point, the main character acquires a henchman – an unusually pretty teen named Toshi who peddles his brother-in-law’s medicines and claims he’ll grow up to be a samurai. All is fun and games until we see a glimpse of Toshi’s future, in which he falls off a horse, and the horse falls on top of him.

The first manga/anime I’d wholeheartedly recommend is “Peacemaker Kurogane” by Nanae Kurono (or Chrono, as she styles her name). It focuses on Hijikata’s page Tetsunosuke Ichimura as the main character, turning him into a properly clichéd shounen hero whose ambition is to become a full-fledged member of the Shinsengumi. It’s a shounen series, so it pays its dues to many genre conventions – especially in the beginning, where the biggest problem is the horribly unfunny slapstick humor that really doesn’t fit the overall mood of the Bakumatsu. Yet it does get most of the historical facts right, and its take on Toshizo Hijikata is absolutely glorious, as the series strikes a perfect balance between his kindness and brutality. The manga is still ongoing – officially at least – but as of late, chapters do not get released regularly, as Kurono keeps putting her work on and off hiatus (she claims writing the comic was smooth sailing until she arrived to Keisuke Yamanami’s seppuku – after that, she realized she’d have to off her characters one by one, and she says she doesn’t have the stomach for it). There’s also a rather decent anime adaptation from 2003. The anime concludes right after the Ikedaya Inn affair – a great place to stop with the story, if you want something akin to a happy ending. (Fun fact: “Peacemaker Kurogane” was my first encounter with the Shinsengumi, and I fell for Hijikata like a suicide off a bridge. To this day, it’s still my favorite pop-culture portrayal of his – and the only reason I didn’t do this cosplay was because I couldn’t pull him off physically. I mean,  just Google the pictures.)

Then there’s the anime “Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto” – quite a mouthful of a title, I know. It’s difficult to recommend this show with a straight face because, let’s face it, a good series it ain’t. The main characters are rarely unlikeable, the plot is an unfortunate mess, and the central twist brings together Takeaki Enomoto’s presidency over the Ezo Republic and Jet Li’s character from “Heroes” – I shit you not. Yet at the same time, the anime has so many amazing moments. Its portrayal of certain historical figures and events is nothing short of brilliant – for instance, the scene where deathly ill Souji Okita shambles in his backyard chasing the black cat is gut-wrenching. In “Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto”, Toshizo Hijikata is introduced as he sits in the photo studio, having that famous picture of his taken. We get to meet Hijikata in his late, post-Shinsengumi phase, when he feels defeated and struggles with doubts, and goes off to the Ezo Republic because he’s looking for a place to die. His characterization is spot on, and from that point of view only, the anime can be a real treat for history buffs. Too bad it fails so spectacularly as a self-contained piece of entertainment.

For newer generations of fans, the main gateway into the world of the Shinsengumi is the “Hakuouki” game franchise. Its pillar is the “Hakuouki: Shinsengumi Kitan” visual novel – which is a fancy euphemism for “dating sim”. You get to play Chizuru, a teenaged doctor’s daughter who gets involved with the Shinsengumi while searching for her missing father – and if you play your cards right, Chizuru can end up romancing one of them. There’s also an overly complicated and rather unnecessary subplot with vampires and demons, and copious amounts of female-oriented fan service (not that there’s anything wrong with the latter). Yet in spite of its dating sim premise, silly supernatural stuff and the fact that the guy that Chizuru chooses makes it out alive no matter his actual fate in history, “Hakuouki” is fantastic in its portrayal of the rise and the fall of the Shinsengumi. It’s really history-heavy, and pretty accurate too – it doesn’t shy away from the nasty side of the story and can get quite dark and cynical at times, as its main source of facts were Nagakura’s real, recently discovered memoires. However, when I played “Hakuouki”, I just couldn’t go for a romance with Hijikata – Sanosuke Harada was my man. There was something inherently wrong with the idea of making Toshizo Hijikata give up on his dreams and destiny in order to have a happily ever after with a teenaged girl.

The cosplay we did is from one of the “Hakuouki” games – the action-oriented “Hakuouki: Bakumatsu Musouroku”. That also explains why the uniforms aren’t sky blue – as is the custom in dating sims, the boys are color-coded for your convenience. Hijikata’s color is purple.

The last recommendation is a Japanese live-action movie from 1999 – “Gohatto”, also known as “Taboo”, directed by Nagisa Oshima (yup, the same guy who made “In the Realm of the Senses”). It’s a bit of an acquired taste, and not everyone will like this bizarre drama that aims to deconstruct “Moeyo Ken”, a popular novel from 1970 that dramatizes the life of Toshizo Hijikata, playing up his historically unfounded friendship with Souji Okita. “Gohatto” tells a story about revenge, obsession, possessiveness and homosexuality among the Shinsengumi – but it goes beyond that, as it shows why in the end the Shogunate was rotten to the core and had no choice but to fall. It’s one of those movies that tell a lot without actually saying anything out loud. At first, I was flabbergasted that Takeshi Kitano got the role of Toshizo Hijikata – let’s face it, the man’s butt ugly and at least 20 years older than Hijikata was when he died. But Kitano’s a great actor, and his portrayal of Hijikata is superb – he plays him like the only sane man in an utterly mad situation, desperate to stay true to himself and figure out what the fuck is going on while everyone around him keep losing their minds.

In the very end, a few acknowledgments. I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to Tenshi and my babygirl Wacky Cherry who did the Shinsengumi cosplay with me; to Una and Spamushka who read each chapter with unyielding fangirl enthusiasm and pushed me into writing more; to Shunak who patiently edited more and more photos when it turned out that the story would be longer than expected; to Teika who made me an exclusive calligraphy of Hijikata’s death poem which is included in one of the pictures; to my mom who cried together with me when I wrote the death scene under the cherry blossoms; and to my husband who put up with my nightly writing and helped me dig through obscure websites in search for more information. And of course, big thanks to all of you readers.   
  
My favorite personal anecdote concerning the Shinsengumi happened in Zagreb, Croatia, in September 2016. Shunak, Cherry and I were cosplay guests at their local convention, and we the girls wore our Shinsengumi costumes for the occasion. After a long day at the con, we were starving, and given that our hotel wasn’t too close to the convention venue, we decided to go straight downtown in full cosplay outfits and grab something to eat, passersby staring awkwardly be damned. So we bought some fast food and sat on a bench to eat – and then a man approached us.   
  
“Excuse me,” he said. “Are those Shinsengumi uniforms?”   
  
It turned out that the man wasn’t familiar with “Hakuouki”. He wasn’t a visitor of the Croatian local convention, and he wasn’t even an anime and manga fan. He was just a guy who really liked Japanese history and the tale of the Shinsengumi – and he recognized the white triangles on our clothes. And thus we sat together for a while, discussing our favorite moments from the Boshin War.   
  
So, all things concerned… When you lay your life for a higher cause somewhere in Japan, and then 150 years later, half across the planet, two random strangers sit together bonding over stories of how awesome you were, life sort of makes sense, no? 

 

 


End file.
